README.rdoc

PoolParty

DESCRIPTION:

PoolParty makes cloud provisioning and management easy. PoolParty provides
a unified interface for provisioning, management and cloud life-cycle on
many different cloud providers, such as EC2 and vmware.

Code your cloud!

SYNOPSIS:

PoolParty is written with the intention of being as application-agnostic as
possible. It installs only the basic required software to glue the cloud
together on the instances as listed below.

The app cloud in the demo pool will be started, bootstrapped and
provisioned to your liking. If the platform is not specified, then it's
assumed to be ubuntu. However, if a node is running, then PoolParty will
introspect the node and determine the operating system. This can be
specified in the clouds.rb.

There are a number of commands PoolParty offers to interact with your
cloud. They include:

cloud start

cloud terminate

cloud bootstrap

cloud configure

cloud compile

cloud console

cloud expand

cloud contract

cloud list

cloud show

cloud ssh

There is also a helper installer script. This is an easy way to get started
bootstrapping your environment:

install-poolparty

We can change the cloud provider simply by changing the using line. For
instance:

Clouds are distinguished by keypairs, so to create multiple clouds, create
a new keypair. For instance:

pool "demo" do
cloud "app" do
keypair "demo_app"
#...
end
cloud "db" do
keypair "demo_db"
#...
end
end

Resources

As you probably noticed from above, you provision your system with
resources. There are native resources, plugins (which are basically
resources) and you can write your own. The base resources included in
PoolParty are as follows:

file

directory

exec

variable

service

package

user

group

link (symlink)

line (line in file)

gem_package

cron

There are also dependency_resolver specific resources. For instance,
*chef* specific resources are as follows:

chef_attribute

http_request

remote_directory

remote_file

route

script

To use these resources in your config file (clouds.rb), simply “assert”
(call) the method with has_ or does_not_have prepended. For instance:

pool "demo" do
cloud "app" do
has_file "/etc/motd", :requires => get_package("apache2")
has_package "apache2" do
action :install
end
end
end

As you can see, there are many different ways to call a resource. All the
following resource calls are identical:

This says that the directory must exist before the file can be created.

You can see the dependency graph setup by your clouds.rb by calling

cloud compile -g output

That will generate a output.dot and output.png in the current directory.
For this to work, you must have dot installed. Try it!

Resources can be built on top of other resources as well. This is the
definition of a resource plugin. This is covered more in-depth on the
homepage. For the curious, take a look at lib/poolparty/plugins/apache.rb
for an example plugin.

There are currently several plugins that ship with PoolParty. Those
include:

Extending

To add a cloud_provider, there are four methods that need to be
implemented. Simply sublcass the CloudProviders module and require it in
your clouds.rb (or commit it back to PoolParty). Those four methods are:

REQUIREMENTS:

INSTALL:

LICENSE:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit
persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the
following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN
NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,
DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR
OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE
USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.